Deepfakes: Nervous November for social media cos with back to back meetings lined up with IT ministers

Deepfakes are synthetic media that have been digitally manipulated to replace one person's likeness convincingly with that of another

A day after social media companies received a summon from the IT ministry regarding a meeting with Minister for Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Ashwini Vaishnaw, sources said that the government has sent another invitation for a meeting, this time with Minister of State Rajeev Chandrasekhar.

While the Vaishnaw meeting will happen on November 23, the Chandrasekhar meeting will happen on November 24, under the banner of "Digital India Dialogue with intermediaries". While the invitation that was sent doesn't explicitly mention the subject of the meeting, Chandrasekhar's recent comments indicate that the November 24 meeting, too, will be on deepfakes.

"You will have to wait till November 24 to see what we do. We will talk to the industry and we will come up with an overall framework that strengthens our existing framework that is already present," said Rajeev Chandrasekhar told news agency ANI on November 21.

It is learnt that the government will share SoP with social media companies on how to deal with such content on their platforms in the meeting.

Moneycontrol has reached out to Google, Meta, and Twitter with further queries on the matter, and this article will be updated when a response is received.

It is not clear why the IT ministry is holding two separate meetings with social media companies on this issue. These meetings were scheduled a few days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighted the problem of deepfakes, and termed it as "problematic".

Deepfake is a piece of technology that leverages AI to alter a person's appearance, voice, or actions in a way that can be realistic and challenging to discern from authentic, unaltered content.

A few weeks back, a digitally altered video of actor Rashmika Mandanna went viral bringing the issue of deepfakes into the limelight.

Following that, MeitY sent an advisory to social media platforms urging them to remove such content from their platforms by pointing that such content affect the modesty of women, and cause "irreparable harm" to citizens.

In its advisory, the government warned such companies that not removing deepfake content from their platforms could attract damages such as losing safe harbour provisions and so on. The safe harbour provision gives internet platforms legal immunity against content shared by users on the platforms.

Vaishnaw had said that, while all platforms had responded to the advisory detailing the steps they take to curb such content on their platform, the government expected them to do more, and in that context, had first said that the MeitY would be meeting with social media companies to "brainstorm" on the issue.